Hi.
My name is Eli Carter. I've been playing with LEGO® toys since I was in kindergarten. Christmas and birthdays always included at least a token LEGO® set for me, even after having kids of my own. I wanted a nameplate for my desk at work that would suit me — and building one from little bricks fit well. A simple mosaic style nameplate would work, but is also trivial to build and pretty low-resolution. So I decided to use an advanced building technique commonly referred to as Studs Not On Top (SNOT). That allowed me to get a lot more detail into the letters. And I was quite pleased with the results, both visually and in terms of the challenge of the build.
But surely I'm not the only one, right? (Shush! Yes, you, in the peanut gallery.) I figured that others who grew up building with these little plastic bricks would like to have their own name built out of LEGO® bricks. But designing a nameplate for each person who wanted one would take way too much of my time. Fortunately, I grew up to be a Software Engineer, so I wrote a program to design a nameplate from just a name, and to create very clear step-by-step directions so people could build their own nameplates.
When I sat down to build my own nameplate, I discovered, much to my surprise, that I didn't have enough of the right parts to build my own name in my collection of LEGO® parts — parts which I have accumulated over a quarter century. If I don't have enough parts to build my own nameplate, I realized that very very few others would either. So I can't really sell just the instructions, I need to provide the parts or few would really build these things.
And so, I built brickbuiltnameplates.com to sell kits to build a nameplate with whatever text you want. You'll get a couple bags of parts, a CD with very clear instructions in a pdf, and the fun challenge of building your own nameplate.
Play well,
Eli